ARE WE READY? / The Bay Area is a model for quake preparedness, but huge gaps remain in retrofitting, response

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It will come suddenly, as they always do.

And when it does, the Big One -- the catastrophic earthquake that scientists warn has a 62 percent chance of striking the Bay Area in the next 30 years -- could surpass Hurricane Katrina in the history books, because it probably will flatten this region with a fury even more destructive.

A major temblor centered in this region would make the wrath of the 1989 Loma Prieta shaker, whose epicenter was about 60 miles away, a dress rehearsal in comparison: more buildings crumbling on people, more roadways collapsing in a spray of cars and bodies and concrete, the earth gyrating more violently beneath everybody's feet.

Regional planners project that the refineries ringing northern Contra Costa County could erupt, wildfires could rip through the lush Marin forestlands, and Delta levees could crumble, flooding every town from Rio Vista to Sacramento. Hospitals and morgues would be so overwhelmed with up to 6,000 dead and 30,000 injured that the dead would have to be stacked into refrigerator trucks to turn morgues into makeshift clinics for the living.

More than 1,700 roads from Santa Rosa to San Jose could shatter, the Bay Bridge could well rattle apart again, phones and power could blink off, and emergency crews -- the ones not dead in rubble -- could take hours to assemble because of impassable streets, tunnels and bridges. Upward of 330,000 people's homes may be too battered to stay in.

Then will come the steadily deepening panic, the paralysis of daily life, and a staggering reconstruction bill of $200 billion.

So is the Bay Area ready?

The answer is a sobering, "Yes, but ..."

The region is more prepared than ever for a major disaster, emergency planners say -- the Federal Emergency Management Agency's current black eye on the Gulf Coast notwithstanding -- thanks to governments and companies spending billions of dollars over the past decade to upgrade water, transportation, communications and emergency response systems. Local and statewide emergency systems are national models for preparedness and coordination, and have performed successfully in recent years during catastrophic floods and fires.

But there are still troubling, huge deficiencies.

Area fire and police departments operate on so many different frequencies that they may not be able to radio each other after a quake; hospitals and thousands of houses remain fragile; the Bay Bridge and BART tunnel are billions of dollars away from being quake-proof; and water pipelines throughout the region will collapse with just the right hit.

For those at the epicenter with smashed homes and injuries, all this will require enormous patience while emergency workers scramble to reach them. Those outside the core damage area need to be prepared -- and most won't be -- to exist on their own without power, water and food for three days.

"Fingers are going to point, things are not going to go right, people will die, and people will get upset and say things should have gone differently," said Bob Robinson, a disaster consultant who has worked as an emergency planning coordinator for Santa Clara County and the Raychem electronics company. "That's just the nature of things."

As San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said this month when he summed up his city's readiness: "I feel we are very well prepared for a disaster ... but the reality is you can never be prepared enough. Never."

Most of the crucial targets of earthquake emergency planners come under eight areas: housing, transportation, shelter, water, hospitals, phones, power and public safety.

Despite some recent advances, there remain alarming vulnerabilities in most of these areas, particularly transportation and housing.

Since 1989, the state has spent billions of dollars to seismically harden virtually all Bay Area freeway overpasses, and all but two of the Bay Area's eight major bridges have been sufficiently upgraded, including the Golden Gate.

Yet the Bay Bridge, the most crucial span of all, has not been seismically protected, nor has the BART Transbay Tube. If both were disabled, the main transit artery of the Bay Area would be severed -- and a sizable chunk of the region's economy put to a standstill.

In the realm of housing and other buildings, Bay Area cities and counties have spent billions on retrofitting, with UC Berkeley alone devoting $650 million to its structures. Seismic standards for shear-wall and foundation bolt-downs on new housing -- key construction methods to keep a building standing while being shaken -- have been stiffened.

But tens of thousands of unreinforced masonry buildings in the Bay Area, whose flying bricks become crushing anvils, remain vulnerable. An untold number of houses with weakly supported bottom floors are sure to crumble. And though communities are confident they can shelter a third of the 330,000 who lose their homes, which may be adequate because many will find their own accommodations -- nobody will know until it happens.

On the subject of water: Both the East Bay Municipal Utility District and the Hetch Hetchy system, managed by San Francisco, are conducting retrofits to protect mainlines, and San Francisco also has an extensive backup water plan.

The Hetch Hetchy water system, however, is billions of dollars away from being safe. Even more foreboding are the 1,600 miles of levees of the Central Valley and Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which provides about one-third of the state's water. Little has been done to improve them, and a breach could inundate valley farmlands and cities as big as Sacramento and Stockton.

The specter of Hurricane Katrina drove home the fact that hospitals are vulnerable, whether it's from wind or the ground shaking -- and the Bay Area's medical centers are scrambling to seismically upgrade. Disaster drills among hospitals are being coordinated on every county level, and they all have the ability to call in regional, state or federal help.

Still, only 67 of the Bay Area's 484 hospital buildings are expected to remain functional in a monumental temblor, according to the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. San Francisco General Hospital, for example, would probably collapse if the quake strikes before current replacement plans are completed, leaving local emergency rooms to fill in the gap of a full-fledged trauma center.

The Bay Area's power grid performed well during Loma Prieta, but oil refineries could be damaged, disrupting gasoline supplies and causing prices to soar. Petroleum lines could rupture and explode. Just as in New Orleans, law enforcement agencies expect some looting and violence in the quake's wake, and though they plan special mobile forces to keep the peace, many officers may be unable to get to their posts because of damaged roadways.

As much as anything, what worries emergency planners is that Bay Area residents are again lax about an earthquake -- like before 1989.

A Red Cross poll in the late 1990s showed that 82 percent of Northern Californians say they are "not very well prepared" for a big earthquake, and an Association of Bay Area Governments survey concluded that only 31 percent of the core region's 100 cities and nine counties had fully tested their emergency plans.

To counteract the blase attitude among residents, San Francisco began a major publicity campaign for its Web site www.72hours.org this month, offering advice for surviving independently for three days after a quake.

The bottom line, many analysts say, is to expect the worst -- and to expect chaos.

"The thing to remember about California is just what ex-Gov. Pete Wilson once said about this state being 'America's disaster theme park,' " said Frannie Edwards, a statewide authority on earthquakes who manages emergency services for San Jose. "Boy, is it true. You never know what will happen next."

At least there is less chance here of the quagmire that entangled the FEMA on the Gulf Coast, emergency planners say.

In California, the cities, counties and state emergency services are expected to handle quakes on their own with little help from FEMA -- an arrangement that worked successfully in the 1994 Northridge and 1989 Loma Prieta earthquakes. FEMA is supposed to be a last resort, and in all California disasters of the past few decades, its chief role was to hand out reconstruction checks.

If state and local resources do become overwhelmed and need to call FEMA, the agency is ready, said regional spokesman Bill Rukeyser, who helped oversee the responses to 1995 North Bay floods.

"Believe me, you won't see the problems you had back East," Rukeyser said. "This state just has much more resource (equipment and emergency personnel), more experience in this."

The main recent red flag about this vaunted cooperation between agencies in California rose in late June, when a tsunami warning issued by the state Office of Emergency Services failed to produce uniform responses up and down the coast. San Francisco officials demanded the state upgrade its warning system, and that is set to happen next month -- but the incident rankled many in emergency planning circles.

And there is still the troubling example of the Gulf Coast. Many disaster analysts blame the bungled gulf response on political tension, missed signals and turf battles among local and state governments and FEMA. They point to the smooth response to last year's hurricanes in Florida -- and say California will do just as well because it does not have Louisiana's storied reputation for partisan volatility.

"Louisiana has never been known for having its act together ... but here? We have a damn good state Office of Emergency Services program and great local emergency offices, and I would trust them," said Mary Comerio, UC Berkeley professor and author of "Disaster Hits Home," a book on post-calamity recovery. "We've already had some big disasters in recent years, so we've been able to detect the chinks in the armor, so to speak, and have tried to address them."

The proof will be in the execution. If the quake strikes at a time when California's political landscape has soured, coordination may not be so certain.

One hopeful sign is a Bay Area-wide planning effort being led by San Francisco with $3.6 million in Homeland Security funding. The idea is to hone a disaster plan by January for all nine main counties, plus Santa Cruz County, by inventorying every emergency resource so response leaders will know instantly who needs what -- such as blood transfusion equipment or radiological detectors.

"We have to figure out the best system together," said Annemarie Conroy, director of San Francisco's Office of Emergency Services. "Because no matter who gets hit the most by the quake, we will all be calling each other."